“Don’t be misled—you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant. Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit.” (Galatians 6:7-8, NLT).
When I was too young to remember, and my dad was in his mid-thirties, he came down with pneumonia and almost died from it. Before then he had been a smoker, but after his brush with death he QUIT.
Later, when I was in junior high school my dad had started back smoking, but only at his office – he claimed that it helped him reduce stress. Eventually, however, he finally quit smoking altogether in his fifties.
Flash forward to when my dad was in his early eighties. His descending aorta was paper-thin and he had qualified for a new experimental procedure where they could sheathe the inside of his aorta so that it wouldn’t explode.
Everything was a go for the surgery. BUT, in one final test they discovered that his arterial walls would never survive the surgery. In other words, this life-saving surgery would surely kill him. WHY? Because his arties were so weak from the effects of smoking – yet he hadn’t lit up for over twenty years!
He had quit smoking! He was exercising. He was trying to eat healthily. BUT, he just couldn’t shake the LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES of his past habit. It would have been easy to ask God, “Look, Lord, I quit a long time ago! I repented of that sin and I’ve turned around! Where are YOU in this, God? I asked for help, but You’re not showing up!”
Yes. It would have been easy for my dad to blame God for not bailing him out of the consequences of his past actions. But he didn’t do that. As a man of faith, my dad THANKED GOD for all the blessings that he had been given, and he asked God to BE WITH HIM through his ordeal – no matter how it should turn out.
In our case, my dad couldn’t get that surgery, but for reasons that only God Himself will ever know, my dad continued to live a reasonably happy life, in fairly good health, with a mind as sharp as a tack, until he was NINETY!
God never promises to bail us out of the consequences that we face as a result of our actions, but HE DOES PROMISE to WALK WITH US through ALL CIRCUMSTANCES so that we can lean on Him and follow HIS PATH to make it through all the crud that this world would throw at us.
See, God is not so much about our circumstances, as He is about our SOULS. He cares for us and walks with us while we’re here for sure; but not necessarily to bail us out of our circumstances (even though He might choose to in some cases), but rather to walk with us through our circumstances and to BAIL US OUT OF DEATH and into ETERNAL LIFE!
David McCall
Executive Pastor
